Portland Fiction Project Interview: Jacob Aiello

This interview was conducted and transcribed by contributor Spencer Cushing.  You can see what Spencer is up to over on Twitter.

There are so many great Authors in the Portland Metro area and what better way to celebrate them than sitting down with them to chat about their writing. This series of interviews begins with the prolific and talented group of writers of the Portland Fiction Project. I met with the venerable Jacob Aiello at Opposable Thumb, up on Belmont, for a beer and a chat. Being the Portlander that he is, he arrived on bike, having fixed his flat tire of course, his messenger bag strewn over his back. We sat down and after telling me of his manic efforts to build an application for a local literary fellowship, we got down to business.

RL: PFP has a show coming up at the Maiden, tell us about that?

JA: It’s with Melissa Favara, who does this thing called the Thousand Words Project. It’s every other month at The Maiden on Morrison and it’s based on the Oulipo Project, which originated in France around the 1960′s-1970′s. It’s basically this idea of writing under certain arbitrary constraints, kind of like a sonnet or a haiku, but you’re writing fiction. With Melissa’s show you write four stories, one story a week for four weeks and each story has to be within 10 words of 250 words. And each story has to include a certain phrase that she picks and like 4-6 words, all of which have to be included in the story somehow. On top of that, all the stories have this umbrella theme and the theme we’re doing is “Lies.”

Melissa sends out the prompts on Monday night, you have a week to write them up and you send them in Sunday night. And that’s it. She prints out all your stories and you read it from the print out at the show, so you can’t edit it afterwards.

I found that the restrictions, rather than inhibiting creativity, inspire creativity. “How do I use these restrictions within my own style, within my own voice, with my own ideas?” You muddle it up and something comes out and it can be really incredible. Something you would never have thought of without those prompts or ideas. It’s literary Sudoku.

RL: That show happens on July 6th @ 7pm at the Maiden. What inspired your piece for Reading Local?

JA: Well, the theme of the Thousand Words Project at the Maiden is “Lies,” so I was thinking about that, writing one of the first stories for that, and the interplay between lies and fiction. Fiction is kind of a clever way of lying. David Mamet wrote, “It’s not lying, it’s a gift for fiction.” I was thinking about that and telling truth through the veil of a make believe story, taking situations and ideas and emotions from real life. It’s almost like interactive therapy almost. In a way.

And I was thinking about this story that I’d written. It’s the first published story I ever wrote. It’s based on a real life event and the interesting thing in the story is that I was really hard on the protagonist, who was kind of a foil for me. He was never going to get what he wanted. Even though the writing of the story had this meta-purpose of like getting exactly what the character was trying to get, the self-delusion of writing and telling the truth in the fiction that I couldn’t accept in real life. The writing brought me to the realization that the character in the story gets so much earlier. So yeah the paradox of fiction, even though it’s a “lie” can actually be truth telling in a way.

RL: What’s your process for writing?

JA: I can only ever write when I can’t write. Like driving, or taking a shower, or on the verge of falling asleep or doing something when your hands are completely immobile. There’s no way you can write it down. It frees your mind to follow certain thoughts to bigger thoughts, and you train yourself to memorize it and it creates a kind of fertile ground. When I just sit in front of the computer there’s just nothing.

When I first started writing, I’d usually have the beginning and/or the end written first. And my writing process was figuring out how to get from point A to point B. And there are benefits and faults to that system. But I think with Portland Fiction Project, I think because we have to write a story once a week so you have to write faster, you have to be more disciplined and you also have to be more experimental. Because if you try the same style, the same process over and over again, it gets boring. It demands you to try things outside your comfort level.

I think I’ve really developed more of a voice with PFP.

RL: What Portland Author would you recommend?

JA: Charles D’Ambrosio, and though she’s not technically in Portland, Aimee Bender, who does the Tin House conference every year. Not only do I have this monster crush on her, but her fiction is incredible. It’s so amazing.

Check out Jacob’s first essay for Reading Local here, and more of his writing for PFP here.  And don’t forget to check out the Portland Fiction Project 7pm on July 6th at the Maiden.